Zurich - Final Week this Year

My Departure was Not This Calm!

My last week and last day in Zurich just flew. Work was full of budget and I had to do some overtime, meaning that I wasn’t even able to swim that much during my last week. I don’t know how I can look at a budget sheet so often and still see mistakes each time.

The weather continued to be brilliant even up to the end of September and the open-air pools extended their closing dates by a week to take advantage of it. It was a bit galling not having enough time to profit from this, but in truth, although the weather was good, the air was getting colder, so if I went swimming, I still went to the indoor pool at Oerlikon (since my local one is now closed).

It’s not so easy to meet up with people now that I work from home, since even if I want to see people at lunch, it means doing traveling that I would otherwise not do. I went into work for a meeting one day and bumped into Mirlinda, who used to work in my department a year ago but, it appears, has just accepted a position in the same building as me but with a different company. It’s a small world. I arranged to meet up with her, but she had to cancel once because she was too busy and then I had to cancel on the Friday, our last chance, because I was too busy.

I did get in to see Teresa and Candice for lunch and to celebrate Teresa’s pregnancy. I hadn’t seen her all year, so it was good to catch up before I left, but again I had to dash away quite quickly because I had a meeting to run from home.

The last week is always a bit frustrating because I suddenly realize all the people I wanted to see (either again or at all) but that I never managed to. I had wanted to contact Holger and Emil, Gerard, Yuen, Willem, Heaven, Marta, Cristel… and many more. It will all have to be next year now.

I’d been trying to clean up at home in the weeks leading up to my departure since I knew I had only one day to get myself ready when I got back from St Petersburg. I even did all my clothes washing on the Saturday evening as soon as I returned to try and give myself an easy last day on Sunday. However, it always surprises me how the amount of things you need to do seems to snowball once you start.

For instance, even though I’d cleaned my fridge a few weeks ago, I still needed to clear out the remaining food – for once there wasn’t much – and give the fridge a final wipe. Then I discovered that I needed to clean my coffee machine since I found a lot of coffee grounds as I was giving it a final dab with my cloth. But in cleaning it, I broke a bit off in the process (I managed to fix it). And autumn was arriving, so my balcony had leaves strewn over it and I felt compelled to clean it. And then I thought that I may as well just clean away all my plants rather than leave them to die in my absence. I didn’t have time to clean the plant pots as well, but basically this is how the tasks just kept on adding up.

I’d also booked to see Alvin Ailey (Dance) on the last day I’d be in Zurich. So, actually, I had only until 1600 to get everything done. As usual, my ambition is larger than my reason. After St Petersburg I was actually starting to feel a bit “cultured out” and questioned my decision, but the performance was good; it was modern dance rather than the classical ballet I saw at St Petersburg. So, that was my crazy schedule!